Saturday, June 25, 2011

Conspiracy theorists would have had a field day if Bob Porter had been killed, but he lived to tell the tail. This is an oldie but goody that I thought I would bring back for laughs and giggles. I know both Bob Porter and Wes Wise, as they interviewed me on videotape at the Sixth Floor for their oral history project, a really important task.

They also have interviews with many other important but unknown witnesses, and those interviews should be transcribed and put on line. - BK

The Saturday, December 5, 1992 article in the Dallas Morning News read: JFK Researcher Accidentally Shot Man is wounded by detective who was handcuffed to Oswald.

By Syliva Martinez

A photographer documenting how a Dallas police officer tried to keep Jack Ruby from shooting Lee Harvey Oswald was accidentally shot himself Thursday.

The bullet was fired from a replica of the gun that killed Oswald.

And the man holding the .38 caliber Cobra was the same detective who was handcuffed to Oswald when the assassin was slain in the basement of Dallas police headquarters 29 years ago.

The photographer, Bob Porter, and former Dallas mayor Wes Wise were at the Garland home of former detective James Leavelle, interviewing him for an oral history project on the Kennedy assassination.

As Mr. Leavelle was demonstrating how to grip the revolver’s cylinder to keep it from firing, the gun went off, tearing into Mr. Porter’s upper right arm.

“It was strictly an accident, “ Mr. Leavelle said. “It was a very unfortunate thing. I should have known better.”

Mr. Porter, who is director of public programming for the Sixth Floor, the West End exhibit on the Kennedy assassination, was in fair condition Friday at Parkland Memorial Hospital after reconstruction surgery on his arm. He is expected to regain about 85 percent of the use of the limb, said his niece, Shelly Porter.

At the time of the Oswald slaying, Mr. Porter worked for the Dallas Times Herald and Mr. Wise, who said he knew Jack Ruby and was a witness at his trial, worked for what was then KRLD-TV (Channel 4).

The 72 year old Mr. Leavelle, who is wearing the white hat in the well-known photography of the Oswald slaying, said he was showing Mr. Porter and Mr. Wise how another detective, L.C. Graves, grabbed Mr. Ruby’s gun in an attempt to stop him from firing.

“I was demonstrating how he gun was held by Detective Graves to keep him from firing,” Mr. Leavelle said Friday. “I was showing them how a cylinder turns on a revolver and how if you stop the cylinder from turning, it won’t fire. They didn’t know that.”

Mr. Leavelle said he had an unloaded pistol and a loaded one. “I just picked up the wrong one.”

“Bob didn’t know he’d been shot,” said Mrs. Porter, who visited her brother-in-law in the hospital early Friday. “Bob said when the explosion of the shot rang out, he said, ‘My God, was that a blank?’ and Mr. Leavelle said, ‘No, it couldn’t have been a blan, and then Bob was in pain.”

Mr. Wise said he also believed that the gun contained a blank.

“Then I heard Bob say, ‘Owl,’ or something like that,” he said, “and then I saw the blood.”

But Mr. Leavelle realized immediately that he had not shot a blank.

“As soon as he jumped, I knew what happened,” he said. “I was totally shocked that it was loaded.”

As Mr. Wise called 911, Mr. Leavelle wrapped a towel around Mr. Porter’s arm. “I was kind of proud how we all hopped to it then,” Mr. Wise said. “Everybody remained calm.”

Mr. Wise said it was “a blessing” that Mr. Porter was struck in the arm and not in the chest. “Just a few inches made the difference.”

Said Mr. Porter’s sister-in-law, “I suppose you could say that it’s rather odd circumstances. We’ve never had anybody be shot before, so this is kind of a new thing, and we don’t like it.”

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

A mark of America's strategic excellence is its preeminent ability to command, control, and communicate with its nuclear forces. An essential element of that ability is the Airborne Command Post, also called "Looking Glass.", which was retired from service on 01 October 1998. Its highly-trained crew and staff ensured there was always an aircraft ready to direct bombers and missiles from the air should ground-based command centers become inoperable. Looking Glass guaranteed that U.S. strategic forces would act only in the precise manner dictated by the President.

The now-deactivated Strategic Air Command (SAC) began the mission on February 3, 1961. It took the nickname Looking Glass because the mission mirrored ground-based command, control, and communications. From that date, a Looking Glass aircraft was in the air at all times 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for more than 29 years. On July 24, 1990, Looking Glass ceased continuous airborne alert, but it remained on ground or airborne alert 24 hours a day. Crews accumulated more than 281,000 accident-free flying hours.

Vasilios Vazakas called attention to the fact that the transcript of Peter Dale Scott's Dallas COPA talk that I posted here was missing a key section, which I now post there, along with a photo of Looking Glass in action and some other sources on the topic.

I would like to digress briefly to describe the central importance of America’s emergency communications network (or so-called Doomsday communications network) in four of the recent deception plots in our history: 11/22, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11.

If one part of the government is deceiving another, it needs its own alternative network to do so. Oliver North, for example, used just such an anti-terrorist network, codenamed Flashboard, to conduct the Iran-Contra arms operations for which he was ultimately fired.

Others beside myself have pointed to the meta-importance of those charged with overseeing the Doomsday communications network, known most recently as the Continuity of Government (COG) network. James Mann, for example, has referred to the COG network overseers as “part of the permanent, though hidden, national security apparatus of the United States, inhabitants of a world in which Presidents may come and go, but America always keeps on fighting.”

In 1991 a CNN feature on the COG overseers described them even more ominously as a “shadow government,” and opened with “In the United States Federal Government there is a super-secret agency which controls this Shadow Government.”

We saw that the key to the provocation-deception producing the false Second Tonkin Gulf Incident depended on the ability to transmit false information on a restricted special network. I have written elsewhere about the importance of war exercises on 9/11 that were being conducted on the special “continuity of government” (COG) network. That Crichton had access to this network in 1963 is a surprising discovery that makes me want to explore more fully a few of the military analogies between the Kennedy assassination in 1963, or what we may call 11/22, and 9/11 almost four decades later.

I wish I knew enough to talk today about the small detail that on both 11/22 and 9/11 there were unexplained reports involving an Air Force special plane, the so-called “Doomsday plane,” – the plane that serves as the military airborne command post (NEACP, pronounced “Kneecap”) for special emergencies. The NEACP flight on 9/11 was in conjunction with a war game, Global Guardian; that on 11/22 has been characterized as a “training” exercise only. But one would like to know whether or not the 11/22 training exercise involved Jack Crichton and the Civil Defense Office in Dallas.

On 11/22 we know only that the EC-135 that served then as the National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP, or “Kneecap”), when in fact airborne, contacted the Fourth Army Headquarters at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. The call was extremely brief:

“This is Silver Dollar calling to test communications. I read you loud and clear, loud and clear. How do you read me?” But it was not routine: the army person receiving did not know what “Silver Dollar” meant (it was NEACP’s communications code name). This led to army intelligence inquiries that day, as soon as it was realized that the call, at 12:25 PM, had come just five minutes before JFK was assassinated.# The fact that NEACP was airborne and making test calls might seem irrelevant to events on the ground in Dallas, until we learn that Crichton’s Civil Defense Post was part of its network.

By 2001 the emergency communications network administered by the Doomsday Plane had been massively augmented in Project 908, a project overseen in the 1980s by a continuity of government (COG) or Doomsday planning group whose membership included Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. As part of the upgrade, the old EC-135s of NEACP had been replaced by four Boeing E-4Bs, now known as “Advanced Airborne Command Posts,” with a project name of “Night Watch.”

According to the Pentagon, all four are assigned to the 55th Wing at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, the Strategic Air Force Command or STRATCOM base to which George W. Bush flew on 9/11. Three of them were airborne on that day, in connection with a live command-level exercise called Global Guardian. One of them was said to be carrying the members of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which was joined one month later by Philip Zelikow, still later director of the 9/11 Commission.

Stratcom canceled the 9/11 war exercises at 9:03 AM, when the second tower was hit. Nevertheless, one of the Doomsday planes was seen and recorded by CNN one hour later, just before 10 AM, in the restricted air space over the White House.# This was about the time that, as I have described elsewhere, Cheney and perhaps Rumsfeld had begun to use the emergency COG communications network administered by the E-4B.

Common sense suggests that it would have been natural to divert an EC4B, already airborne on 9/11 for Global Guardian, to oversight of the perceived attack on Washington. But the very core of COG planning was to ensure geographic separation between the existing government and its shadow alternate. Cheney reportedly sequestered personnel in underground bunkers for ninety days after 9/11, “since there was evidence, he hinted, that the terrorist organization al-Qa’ida…had nuclear weapons”

The EC4B’s presence in Washington can be taken as an indication that those responsible for its presence there (presumably Cheney and Rumsfeld) had no such worries for its safety. Recent research by Larry Hancock and Larry Haapanen indicates a similar situation on 11/22: available records suggest that while some senior bureaucrats worried about the possibility of a foreign attack on that day, there was an eerie passivity at the highest levels, suggesting no such concern.

This would indicate that, while phase-one stories such as Stringfellow’s report were being transmitted, those at the highest level of responsibility set no store by them. I doubt that this disconnect can be attributed to ignorance. On the contrary, I takeCrichton’s status in the Center as an sign that persons intimately involved with each deep event (Crichton on 11/22, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld on 9/11) were part of the secret Doomsday communications network evolved to deal with a national emergency.

The same observation can be made about key figures in Watergate and Iran-Contra, the two other major deep events of the last half-century. James McCord, the leader of the burglars arrested inside Watergate, was among other things a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, in a small unit charged with developing contingency plans in a national emergency “for imposing censorship on the press, the mails and all telecommunications (including government communications).”

Oliver North, the Reagan White House point man on both Iran-Contra and COG planning, had access to a secure communications system “that excluded other bureaucrats with opposing viewpoints…The counter-terrorism network even had its own special worldwide antiterrorist computer network, codenamed Flashboard, by which members could communicate exclusively with each other and their collaborators abroad.”# It was by this time, as noted above, that COG emergency planning had been redefined under Reagan to designate “terrorism” as its principal target.

Those with resource to such secure networks are in a position to manipulate our country’s history, when necessary by provocation-deception plots.

FOR COMPLETE AND UPDATED VERSION GO TO: http://www.ctka.net/2011/Journalists_&_JFK_2.html

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy a decision was made at the highest levels of government that, even though the evidence that indicated the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was acting at the behest of Cuba was not true, it could be used to strong arm reluctant leaders in the legislative and judicial branches of government to do what the new president wanted.

Earl Warren later explained in an oral history interview for the LBJ Library, that after he was asked to head the commission, “I told them I thought I shouldn’t do it, and I made some suggestions to them as to people whom they might get who would fill the purpose. And I thought that was the end of it. And then in about an hour I got a phone call from the White House and was asked if I could come up and see the President. And I said, ‘certainly,’ so I went up there. And the President told me that he was greatly disturbed by the rumors that were going around the world about a conspiracy and so forth, and that he thought that it might – because it involved both Khrushchev and Castro – that it might even catapult us into a nuclear war if it got a head start, you know, and kept growing.”

“And he (LBJ) said that he had just been talking to McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense then,” Warren continued, “and that McNamara had told him that if we got into a nuclear war that at the first strike we would lose sixty million people. And he impressed upon me the great danger that was involved in having something develop from all this talk. He said he had talked to the leaders of both parties and that members of Congress – Dick Russell and Boggs on the Democratic side and Ford and Cooper on the other side – and John McCloy from New York and Allen Dulles would be willing to serve on the commission if I was to head it up.” (1)

And this was not just an off-the-cuff decision, as John Newman puts it, “It is now apparent that the World War III pretext for a national security cover-up was built into the fabric of the plot to assassinate President Kennedy.” (2)

By threatening nuclear war if it were true, LBJ used the disinformation of Castro and Cuba complicity to convince the chief justice and congressmen to enjoin the commission, and persuaded them to go with the Lone-Nut scenario because any conspiracy had to be a foreign one. To accept the Lone-Nut scenario as possible or even plausible, all of the accused assassin’s intelligence connections had to be ignored and the assassin portrayed as a lone nut loser acting on unknown psychological motives. (3)

Life magazine was one of the most prolific supporters of this fairytale, just as it was earlier in leaking Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis and Mongoose intelligence, and after the assassination in anointing the staged Tonkin Gulf Incident in order to get Congressional authorization for the war in Vietnam. (4)

As the most popular magazine in America at the time, Life was more influential than radio and TV news at the time. Life was the perfect platform to deliver any disinformation the CIA wanted widely distributed to a mass audience, was used to influence key policy makers as well as the public, and to discredit President Kennedy, as they tried to do on numerous occasions.

Who are these guys? Well in looking at the Life magazine masthead of that era you will find a number of pertinent names – including Henry and Clare Booth Luce, C.D. Jackson and Issac Don Levine.

Henry Luce, born in China to missionary parents, attended Yale, was a Skull & Boner, and with his schoolmate and partner Briton Hadden, quit the Baltimore News to form Time Inc., publishing Time Magazine in 1926, Fortune in 1930 and Life magazine in 1936, and remaining editor-in-chief of all his publications until 1964. A powerful Republican Party leader and committed anti-communist, he was a strong supporter of Chiang Kai-shek and “the China Lobby,” and against Castro in Cuba. Although Henry Luce died in 1967, his legacy continues to make an impact today. (5)

It wasn’t a one-man show, and Luce surrounded himself with like-minded publishers, editors, photographers and writers, most notably his second wife, Clare Booth Luce.Before dealing with Clare Booth Luce, it should be noted for the record that Henry Luce is also said to have had an affair with Mary Bancroft, one of Allen Dulles’ 0SS agents and paramour, while Dulles is said to have been intimate with Luce’s wife. And in retrospect, Clare Booth Luce was in many ways more of a player than Henry Luce himself. (6)

Before she became a Congresswomen and ambassador (to Italy), Clare Booth Luce had struck up an early friendship with John F. Kennedy, sending him a good luck coin during World War II. (7)

Clare Booth Luce has been aptly described as, “One of the wealthiest women in the world, widow of the founder of the Time, Inc. publishing empire, former member of the House of Representatives, former Ambassador to Italy, successful Broadway playwright, international socialite and longtime civic activist, Luce was responsible for later ‘leads’ in the JFK assassination aftermath. Luce will later claim that sometime after the Bay of Pigs she receives a call from her ‘great friend’ William Pawley – who wants to put together a fleet of speedboats which would be used by the exiles to dart in and out of Cuba on ‘intelligence gathering’ missions. Luce eventually sponsors one of the boats. She refers to the crew of this boat as ‘my boys.’ Luce will also maintain that it is one of these boat crews that brings back the first news of Soviet missiles in Cuba. JFK, she says, didn’t react to it so she helped to feed the information to Senator Kenneth Keating, who made it public.” (8)

She sat in the same limo with LBJ on JFK’s inauguration day, and when she asked him why in the world he took the Vice Presidential slot instead of staying in the more powerful position he held in Congress, she quoted him as saying, “Clare, I looked it up; One out of every four presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I got.” (9) Although the true odds were one in five presidents, or twenty percent, died in office, perhaps LBJ knew he could improve those odds, and it wasn’t such a gamble at all.

With the new democratic administration, Luce’s brought aboard a new publisher, C. D. – Charles Douglas Jackson, an OSS hand and President Eisenhower’s personal administrative assistant on psychological warfare and Cold War strategy. (10)

While Jackson would remain in the background, devising strategy, Clare Booth Luce wrote a weekly column and an occasional photo feature for Life, which ran articles on the impending invasion of Cuba before the Bay of Pigs, and in one column, a week before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Clare Booth Luce chastised the President for ignoring the evidence of offensive missiles in Cuba. (11) She says she had been told this by ‘her boys,’ who ran commando missions in and out of Cuba, but she also apparently saw the U2 photos leaked by the Air Force liaison to NPIC, before they were revealed to the president. The NPIC U2 photos of missiles in Cuba were also shown to Sen. Keating (R. NY) by Col. Philip J. Corso, who later bragged about leaking it in his book “The Day After Roswell.” Corso has also been involved in other highly technical back propaganda operations designed to either implicate or absolve the CIA in the assassination of President Kennedy. (12)

Then after Cuban Missile crisis was successfully resolved, Luce began writing stories about Mongoose, the CIA’s supposedly covert operations against Castro, which you could have read all about in Life, as they ran photos and stories about Operation Red Cross (aka the Bayo/Pawley Mission) and other anti-Castro missions. She was particularly proud of “her boys,” the team of anti-Castro commandos who ran maritime missions into Cuba in their speed boat, and she financially backed, though they were also supported by the CIA. They were based out of the CIA’s JMWAVE base in Florida, affiliated with the DRE and led by Julilo Fernandez. (13)

On the night of the assassination, Clare Booth Luce says was awaken from sleep by a phone call from Fernandez, who claimed to have exclusive knowledge of the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, including recordings of him, and other records that appeared to substantiate his pro-Castro leanings and the original Phase One cover-story. Luce told him to call the FBI, but he didn’t, or at least there is no record of him having done so. (14)

The Luces could have slept soundly that night, knowing that Life Magazine was on top of the story. They had people at Dealey Plaza - the scene of the crime of the century, and before the weekend was over they would have sole ownership of the single most desired peace of evidence, the Zapruder film of the assassination. They would also obtain the Backyard photos of the accused assassin, his “Historic Diary,” exclusive photos of the Oswald family and contractually tie up Marina’s story for decades.

And before the weekend was out, the accused assassin would be executed while in police custody, and branded the lone assassin. It was just a matter of whether he was going to be portrayed as part of a Cuban Communist conspiracy or as a deranged, lone nut, the answer to which would depend on how it all played out in public.

Life had a good team working on the assassination, though it’s clear they didn’t have foreknowledge of the assassination since the Texas bureau chief, Holland McCombs was in Austin, working on a story about the sex lives of college students. McCombs got the job at Life after giving Henry Luce a raucous tour of Texas, introducing him to cantinas, tequila and hot peppers. After Luce hired him, they say his first job was to get a spy in the office of the president of Mexico, clearly showing Luce’s interests also went south of the border. (15)

McComb and served in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) so such an operation was within his wherewithal. McComb later helped abort Life Magazine’s belated 1967 investigation of a domestic conspiracy. McComb supported his friend Clay Shaw, a suspect in Jim Garrison’s case in New Orleans, even though he developed evidence that supported a conspiracy. In February 1964 McComb and Life had developed the fact that the McCurley brothers, who had assisted Oswald hand out the FPCC leaflets in New Orleans, patronized the Black Lamp, a gay bar in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where there was a bartender named Frankie Hydell. The Warren Report claimed that there was no such person, and the information McComb and Life developed went uninvestigated by both Life and the Warren Commission. (16)

Although McComb was in Austin at the time of the assassination, he had hired a young intern and stringer, Patsy Swank, who was heels on the ground in Dallas and would come up with the scoop on the Z-film.

As soon as they heard about the assassination, McCombs, and the west coast editor in Los Angeles Richard Stolley, flew immediately to Dallas, probably under orders or assignment from C. D. Jackson in New York. Stolley brought along a photographer Alan Grant and writer Tommy Thompson, who was from Dallas, also flew in. Stolley set up shop in a room at the Adolphis Hotel, just across the street from the Carousel Club, and where the Secret Service and White House Communications Agency (WHCA) had their base of operations during the President’s visit. (17)

Although the FBI had lost track of Oswald when he moved to New Orleans, and he kept a room by himself in Oak Cliff, Oswald had subscribed to magazines that were sent to the Paine house, including The Worker, the official organ of the Communist Party in the USA, the Trotskyite Militant, and Time Magazine. Therefore, at the time of the assassination, Time-Life had Oswald’s address at the Paine home in their files in New York, where their offices were at Rockefeller Center. (18) That’s also where the British Security Coordination was based, and where Oswald’s mother worked in a retail shop on the first floor of the Empire State Building. While it may have been unknown to some of the authorities who were looking for him, Time-Life had Oswald’s address in their subscription file. And it didn’t take long for the Life team to get there.

While Thompson and photographer Alan Grant went out to the Paine house in Irving, Patsy Swank was at the Dallas Police Department, where she had been tipped her off about a film of the assassination. She called Stolley at the Adolphis on the phone and in a hushed voice so other reporters wouldn’t hear her, told him about the movie of the assassination that was taken by a man whose last name began with a “Z.” Stolley quickly found Zapruder’s name in the phone book, assumed it was him, and called his home every fifteen minutes until Zapruder finally answered. Mr. “Z” had been driving around aimlessly thinking about what he had witnessed through the lens of his camera. Stolly wanted to meet him immediately but Zapruder said to see him at his office early the next morning. (19)

Meanwhile, with Grant snapping exclusive photos, Thompson had gotten Marina’s confidence, and with C. D. Jackson persuading her with cash, the wife and mother of the accused assassin agreed to give them her exclusive story if Thompson would take them to see Oswald at the jail. (20)

Although the Zapruder film, the Backyard photos, the “Historic Dairy,” Thompson’s articles and Grant’s photos that Life published have all been examined extensively and deserve even further scrutiny, Marina’s story is the clincher. With the death of Oswald, his guilt or innocence in the eyes of the public and history depended on how she portrayed her husband. But it wasn’t really Marina’s portrait of Oswald, it was the author’s portrait, as described, at least in part, by Marina in Russian, and translated by the author.

At first it was reported that Marina’s story would be ghost written by Issac Don Levine, its in-house Russian defector and professional anti-communist propagandist. (21) Levine would have been perfect for the job, if they were going to stick with the Cuban Communist Conspiracy Cover-story, but that slowly fell by the wayside as it became apparent that it just wasn’t true.

That didn’t matter to Levine any more than it didn’t matter to LBJ. Levine had previously written The Mind of the Assassin, about Leon Trotsky’s killer Raymond Mercader, who Levine cleverly unmasks as a deep penetration agent of Stalin’s KGB’s assassination directorate SMERSH. Mercader got to Trotsky in exile in Mexico City and stabbed him to death, was convicted for it, served time in prison and was later released. (22)

Oswald had described himself as a Trotskyite, and subscribed to The Militant, the monthly publication of the Trotskyite party in the United States, which was founded by the father of Michael Paine, Oswald’s chief benefactor at the time of the assassination. Besides providing room and board for Oswald’s wife and two kids, Michael Paine also handled Oswald’s belongings, including the alleged assassination rifle, which was kept in his garage while Oswald went to Mexico. (23)

It’s still unclear what Oswald did in Mexico City, but with his fascination with Trotsky, one must wonder if he visited the apartment where Trotsky was killed, or knew the details, as written and published in Issac Don Levine in his book The Mind of the Assassin, which, if you look up Issac Don Levine’s Wiki bio, fails to even mention The Mind of the Assassin, possibly his most important work. (24)

Marina’s story isn’t listed either, because he never got the job, and instead the contract was given to Priscilla Johnson (McMillan).

Priscilla, like George DeMohrenschildt, had the unique attribute of having made the acquaintance of both the President and his accused assassin. Oswald’s good friend DeMohrenschildt knew the Kennedys from their support of the Cystic Fibrosis Charity that he established with his second wife, Dr. De De Sharples.

Priscilla knew JFK from Massachusetts, where she worked for him in 1954, and a few years later she met Oswald in Moscow at the time of his defection. (25)

So she wasn’t entering the drama cold. She was already a player, and an integral part of the disinformation network that promoted the Dealey Plaza operation cover-story and protected those responsible for the murder of John F. Kennedy.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Getting Congressional oversight hearings on the JFK Act is one thing that can and should be done, and will happen as soon as someone convinces Rep. Darrell Issa (R. Calf.), the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, to do his job and hold them.

It's possible JFK Act Oversight Hearings could be held as early as September, or next March, during Sunshine Week, if enough people request the hearings, a big if.

The Republicans controlled the House of Representatives for a decade and didn't conduct any oversight, and when the Democrats finally got in there, with a Democrat in the White House, they didn't want to "rock the boat." Now the Republicans are back, and the responsible committees are controlled by Republicans who have the ability to schedule hearings and begin investigations. Issa has shown however, in the targets of his investigations, that he being very partisan and going after Democrats, especially the Obama administration.

The issue of JFK Act Oversight Hearings is not even a bi-partisan issue, it's a NON-partisan issue that not only Democrats and Republicans agree should happen, but it is backed by both liberals and conservatives, Lone-Nuts and Conspiracy Theorists alike.

Getting new, sworn testimony on JFK assassination records issues would be huge, and if they try to answer just some of the outstanding questions related to the disposition of the records it is likely they will hold more than one hearing as the Oversight committee is the "investigative arm" of the House of Representatives.

Officially, "The Congressional Oversight and Reform Committee is the main investigative committee of the House of Representatives. It has jurisdiction to investigate any federal program and any matter with federal policy implications."

I think we have an excellent chance of convincing Issa that it's vitally important to hold hearings on the JFK Act, and get the sworn testimony of the Secret Service official who destroyed records AFTER the JFK Act was established by law, and determine who in the Air Force ordered the Andrews log for 11/22/63 thrown in the trash, and what became of the negative of the photo of the swearing in aboard AF1 that disappeared from the vaults NARA?

If the Committee chair and Committee members want to learn the answers to these questions themselves, then we have a better chance of getting them to ask them.

Why is the CIA stonewalling Jeff Morely on the Joannides/DRE records? What happened to the Air Force One radio tapes? Who at the White House Communications Agency was responsible for their now missing records? Why are records that were open in full years ago now being withheld? Are the agencies and departments of government responding to Obama's Executive Orders on FOIA and Open Government? What about the MLK Records of the HSCA?

So many questions, with nobody to ask them and nobody to answer them.

What can you do?

Join us in the ancient methods of grassroots democracy, combined with thelatest digital networked communications.

The right to petition the government is one of the most basic democratic rights, and is one of the weapons we are using to try to get Congress to hold Oversight Hearings on the JFK Act, to get a Special Federal Grand Jury to investigate the assassination of President Kenendy and to obtain proper forensic autopsies of the victims, all things guaranteed in the Constitution and the way our government is supposed to work.

A petition is merely a request, and you have to request what you want and what should happen or nobody is going to make a move. Once you ask, they might turn you down, but you got them to respond.

More deep background on Congressional Oversight of JFK Act

As the Final Report of the ARRB says:

Section 12(a) of the JFK Act states that the provisions of the Act...shall continue in effect until such time as the Archivist certifies to the President and the Congress that all assassination records have been made available to the public in accordance with the Act.”

Therefore the JFK Act is a LIVING LAW, one that is still in effect and shall continue and remain in effect until all assassination documents are declassified, released and made available to the public, whenever that day comes, sometime in 2017.

It has been over ten years now since the ARRB completed its work, so it is imperative that Congress take some action now to ensure that the work mandated by the JFK Assassination Records Act is completed.

The House Government Reform and Oversight Committee is responsible for the oversight of the JFK Act, and when hearings are eventually held on the JFK Act, the responsible sub committee will be chaired by Rep. James Lankford (R. OK) on Information Policy, with jurisdiction that includes public information, the Freedom of Information Act, the Presidential Records Act and the National Archives and Records Administration.

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP MAKE IT HAPPEN:

If you live in the district of any of these Congressmen, and they represent you, they will pay more attention to your letter, phone call, email or fax, because you are a constituent and represent a potential vote.

If so, please go out of your way and ask your Representative to hold public hearings on the JFK Act and to notify you when they are scheduled before they happen so you can attend, view it on C-SPAN and be kept informed of what happens.

Real Democracy depends on an educated electorate, so stay informed.

JFK Act Oversight Hearings – SUMMER OFFENSIVE – 2011 Pro-active Strategies and Tactics will be employed in a campaign for Congressional oversight of the JFK Act and enactment of the MLK Act.

When the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) closed up shop nearly ten years ago, we thought that oversight hearings of the JFK Act would be forthcoming, a sort of After Action Report, as required by law, but it never happened and won't happen unless a concerted effort is made to make it happen.

Once JFK Act oversight hearings are held, and new sworn testimony is taken, then the dominos will begin to fall, and it will become easier to accomplish other goals, such as the convening of a Special Federal Grand Jury to determine if anyone can be indicted for crimes related to the assassination, and order a proper forensic autopsy of the victims.

The Congressional Oversight Hearings appear to be the easiest of things desired, but it has proved elusive. After years with no interest by the Republicans, who decided not to exercise their oversight responsibilities at all when they controlled the leadership, the Democrats are now equally busy with their own agendas on what issues they intend to hold public hearings on.

There are others who are quietly trying to persuade Congress to hold JFK Act oversight hearings, and acting privately through correspondence and behind closed doors, but we are the most outspoken and broadest coalition of people interested in and intent on getting Congressional oversight of the JFK Act.

So far, we have agreed, per Bill Simpich's suggestion, that we do something different every month – and build up some momentum and pubic support for Congressional hearings and oversight of the JFK Act.

4) Senator John Kerry (D. Mass.), has endorsed the MLK Act and needs to be briefed on necessity of oversight hearings of JFK Act.

5) Your Representative will listen to you and reflect the need for JFK Act oversight hearings to these committee and subcommittee chairman or other members of the committee (See: List of House Oversight Committee ) who they work with on other issues.

If any of these Congressmen represent you, please contact them and ask them to support oversight of the JFK Act.

Why we need oversight hearings:

* The JFK Records Collection Act (Public Law No. 102-526) mandated oversight hearings following termination of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) to implement on going release of records by all agencies and to review the effectiveness of the Review Board process. Section 5 (g) PERIODIC REVIEW OF POSTPONEDASSASSINATION RECORDS

(1) All postponed or redacted records shall be reviewed periodically by the originating agency and the Archivist consistent with the recommendations of the Review Boardunder section 9(c)(3)(B). Section 7 (l) OVERSIGHT -- (1) The Committee on Government Operations of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Governmental Affairs of the Senate shall have continuing oversight jurisdiction with respect to the official conduct of the Review Board and the disposition of postponedrecords after termination of the Review Board; and shall have access to any records held or created by the Review Board

SAMPLE LETTER:

To: The Honorable William Lacy Clay, Jr. United States House of Representatives 2418 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515-2501

March 16, 2010

Dear Congressman Clay,

Having lived in nearby St. Louis County for over 25 years, I know that I speak for thousands of your constituents and millions of Americans when I say that trust in government has reached an all time low.

It is essential to the health of our democracy that our trust in our leaders and our institutions be restored. One step toward restoring this trust would be for Congress to insure that laws it has enacted are enforced. Where the rule of law has been ignored, Congress is entrusted to demand accountability. In disregard of Congress and the JFK Act of 1992, relevant official records continue to be withheld from the public, while other relevant official records have been destroyed! For this reason I think it is of the utmost importance that public oversight hearings on the JFK Act be convened.

I thank you for your help in this important matter.

Sincerely,Michael J. Griffin

Committee Membership

Majority Members (Republicans)Member Name DC Phone DC FAX Contact Form

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

A couple of years ago, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada told me something that shocked me, and that I will never forget. When Reid was a young man, he had worked his way through law school at George Washington University in Washington D.C. as a fulltime Capitol Hill cop, a patronage job accorded him by Nevada's lone member of the House at the time, a boozy old reactionary named Walter Baring. In the evenings, it was Reid's habit to take his break in the Congressman's office, as Baring held forth over his customary cocktail.

On the evening of November 22, 1963, as the nation and world began to absorb the murder that day in Dallas of President Kennedy, Reid sought solace with his congressman. Baring, Reid said, was "one of those guys for whom there was a Communist behind every bush. Fluoride was a Communist plot. And Kennedy, too, had been leading us down the path to Communism, Baring told me. It was probably a good thing that he was murdered."

Reid was stunned into silence, astonished that anyone, much less a sitting member of the United States Congress, would hold such a hideous position as to sanction the murder of anyone, much less the president.

Sunday, it will have been forty-six years since that day.

And lately, as the paranoid strain in the American polity has reasserted itself — that strain which ascribes the worst possible motives to one's political opponents, and where lies abound and violence becomes possible, I thought of the story that Senator Reid told me and wondered if a fool such as Baring now held office in the congress. As I am from Texas, home over the years to some of the most wonderful and ridiculous members of congress, sometimes situated in the same person, I thought of my home delegation, and in my mind formed the image of the skinhead reprobate from Tyler, Louie Gohmert.

Characterized chiefly by the blankness behind his eyes, Gohmert has the face of a hooligan and the politesse to match. Stinking of contempt, no greater reactionary is to be found in the Congress today. And certainly it is people like him who have abetted the toxic atmosphere that holds in our current politics. He has screamed that the president is a "socialist!" perhaps louder and longer than anyone else in his caucus (which is quite a distinction), he is a birther who believes that Obama is an alien Muslim, and he has said that the president’s health care plan will "absolutely kill senior citizens. They'll put them on lists and force them to die early."

So as I thought about Congressman Gohmert, I decided that he is either a demagogue, a fool, or both. Of course, and to be clear, it would be indecent to ascribe to him the insanity of Congressman Baring's position. But here I suppose I am addressing the law of unintended consequences. If you with abandon promulgate such outlandish distortions of the truth, and feel it your duty to stoke the fires of our baser instincts to the point of hysteria over the utter destruction of the American system, do you bear responsibility when someone who ingests your bile responds violently?

As I thought about this, I came upon a coincidence.

In Austin, doing some research at the LBJ Library, I found buried deep in the stacks a letter written to President Johnson by a woman who lived in the district now represented by Louie Gohmert (incidentally the same general area once represented by the great Sam Rayburn).

The letter, simply and beautifully written by a woman named Charlotte Essman, is dated November 24, 1963, two days after Kennedy's assassination. Were I to have come upon the letter ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, I would have read it as an interesting artifact from a troubled time, long since past.

In this time of mourning and appreciating how very busy you are, I still must write about existing conditions here in East Texas, even if you are too busy to read this, because I feel it is my duty to do so. I wanted to write President Kennedy's staff and try to get them to persuade him not to go to Dallas but unfortunately didn't do it for fear of being that crank or busy–body. This time I will risk that appellation. I am frightened at conditions that prevail in East Texas.

Mr. President, the easy thing and what is desperately trying to be done [is] to convince a stunned nation and world that Mr. Kennedy's murder was the work of some deranged crackpot, and while the trigger was pulled by such a one, perhaps the atmosphere that made it inevitable was the hatred of the people (I don't mean every one of them but a big majority) who wanted Mr. Kennedy and any one connected with him out of the White House. A week ago this might have sounded ridiculous but subsequent events lend it credence, I believe. There is a virus of disrespect and hate spreading here very rapidly. And unless one lives right here with it, day in and day out, it is unbelievable how quickly and subtly it infects reasonably intelligent persons. This is not too hard to understand only if one recognizes the unremitting, deep, bitter religious and racial prejudice existing today in this section of our land — I don’t know if any of them are similarly infected in other sections, but I knowpersonally of what I speak as regards East Texas. In fact, although nearly every one indignantly denies having any racial or religious prejudice to the point where he deceives even himself in this matter, after listening seriously to protestations of horror and shock one can almost hear a collective sigh in essence, "Too bad he had to die but after all a Catholic is no longer in the White House and this ought to set the 'niggers' back on their heels for awhile!"

It is painful to some of us I know to give credence to such a condition so we blind ourselves and blame a mentally confused person — forgetting in our desire to remove the blame from ourselves that where religious and racial prejudice prevails, not just the killer but all are mentally confused. When this prejudice is played upon adroitly and exploited actively (as in our locality) by such groups as The American Fact-Finding Committee and many more [of] that ilk, for instance the John Birchers, etc., it soon fans into a situation as exists here, many, many citizens ridden by a vicious hate which inevitably erupts and expresses itself in violence — as in the case of Mr. Kennedy's murder in Dallas.

A strong evidence of this was the recent demonstration of violence against Ambassador Stevenson in Dallas, and even more clearly by an article carried in the Dallas News (a 100% anti-Kennedy sheet) stating that Mr. Bruce Alger [then-congressman from Dallas, and the only Republican in the Texas delegation] advised the citizens of Dallas there was absolutely no need to feel apologetic about this incident — everyone being free to express his opinion. He neglected to specify the degree of violence of such expression. And the citizens vote for Bruce Alger! So what can one expect? I just heard the flash about Oswald being shot and also the theory that is was caused by mass hysteria. That is here, all night, but I think rather there are certain groups and individuals who wish to insure Oswald's complete and continuing silence because, knowing the 'temper' of Dallas, I can’t believe a known police character of Ruby's caliber would risk his neck through any feeling of patriotism or love for Mr. Kennedy — can you?

I don’t know if anything can be done about the festering sore of prejudice and hatred on our social structure here, but I doubt if you can know its deadliness unless you are in constant, daily touch, and I thought it my duty to mention it, in that case, even though you may consider I am an alarmist and am exaggerating. I only wish I were.